Monday, August 3, 2015

The true heir to the class-infused folk and protest music of Woody Guthrie and his contemporaries is not jingoistic and xenophobic - when not outright racist - modern Country, but rather Rap and Hip-Hop.

Presley
is also mostly wrong about what her father’s money funded. That tax
money went to a military buildup, the nation’s oversized and racist
prison system, servicing the nation’s debt, and replacing the high tax
rates once paid by the rich. In 2012, the 1 percent became the richest
in recorded history earning 19.3 percent of American income, surpassing
the previous record of 18.7 percent, set in 1927, just before this
income inequality contributed to the Great Depression. Between 1979 and
2007, the one percent captured 53.9 percent of the increase in U.S.
income while average income for our elites grew by 200.5 percent versus
just 18.9 percent for the bottom 99 percent. Between 1978 and 2011, CEO
pay rose 726.5 percent versus 5.7 percent for workers.

This
doesn’t mean the song is wrong or bad. Presley may well be presenting
her and her father’s point of view, one typical of much of the white
working class. Presley grew up in Beauty, Kentucky. That is in Martin
County, on the West Virginia border, deep in Appalachia. Martin County
is over 99 percent white. Thirty-seven percent of the county’s residents
live below the poverty line. Despite this, Martin County gave Mitt
Romney 83 percent of its vote in 2012, compared to 15 percent for Barack
Obama. This was one of the highest votes for Romney in the state, with
more than 89 percent of nearby Leslie County voting for Romney being his
highest. If these people vote, it’s overwhelmingly for a political
party with the open agenda of destroying the social safety net they
benefit from at higher rates than most of the country. Even when some of
the mine jobs were union, these were not middle class folks; coal
mining was always dangerous and not well-paid. But the mythology of the
middle class can exist when you see people who are below you in social
class. In Martin County and evidently for Presley, that’s largely black
people, people who do not live there, who are in Louisville, Cincinnati,
New York City. These are the others taking money from the hard working
taxpayers of Martin County, even as social services flow into that
impoverished place.

This nation has a toxic
relationship with class and race. The politics of middle class mythology
reinforce the corporate powers that increasingly control our lives. If
all whites are middle class–or all whites who include lifelong coal
miners left with nothing–then politics that actually promote the
interests of the poor are undermined. If the poor consider themselves
“middle class,” how do we create institutions that effectively demand a
more robust welfare state and worker power? I’m not sure we can until we
disconnect popular ideas of class from race. And given the upsurge in
racism over the past seven years, we are far from accomplishing that
goal.

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About Me

"Blue" in Blue in the Bluegrass refers to my politics, not my state of mind, although being progressive-democratic in Kentucky is not for the faint of heart.
The Bluegrass Region of Kentucky is Central Kentucky, the area around Lexington. It's also sometimes known as the Golden Triangle, the region formed by Louisville in the west, Cincinnati in the north and Lexington in the east-south corner. This is the most economically advanced, politically progressive and aesthically beautiful area of the state. Also the most overpopulated by annoying yuppies and the most endangered by urban sprawl.
A Yellow Dog Democrat is one who will vote for even a yellow dog if it is running as a Democrat. I can't claim to be quite that fanatically partisan, especially since quite a few candidates who run as Democrats in Kentucky are more Republican than a lot of Republicans I can name.
But I do love the story Kentucky House leader Rocky Adkins never tires of telling about the old-timer in Eastern Kentucky who was once accused of being willing to vote for Satan if Satan ran as a Democrat. Spat back the old-timer:
"Not in a primary, I wouldn't!"
Amen.